Guest Voice: Athletes should be students first

The term “student-athlete” is meant to conjure up images of college football players hitting the books after practice. It is not meant to make you think about private dining halls, miniature golf courses and bowling alleys.

But these types of perks are very much part of the life of today’s football-playing student-athletes. Unable to pay them salaries, universities have hit upon lavish buildings, with both athletic and recreational amenities, as a way to attract the most promising recruits out of high school.

The current poster child for wretched excess could well be Clemson, the public university in South Carolina that has made it into this year’s four-team playoff for the national title, which begins on New Year’s Eve. Clemson is building a $55 million facility that will include multiple recreational lounges, a miniature golf course, a bowling alley, a movie theater, a barber shop and a volleyball court — all reserved for use by athletes.

The other three teams in the playoffs — Alabama, Oklahoma and Michigan State — are not far behind in this ongoing arms race. Nor are numerous other institutions hoping to make it to the pinnacle of big-time college football. According to The Washington Post, 48 institutions spent a combined $772 million on facilities in 2014, a near doubling of a decade earlier.

Universities have long built lavish training facilities for their football players, and the student-athlete concept has become increasingly quaint in the era of mega-TV contracts. Even so, the idea of adding private-dining and leisure-time amenities took off in 2013, when the University of Oregon opened what might best be called a luxury day spa for football players.

For the general public, this is a discouraging trend. Current and former students are $1.2 trillion in debt, while the cost of a college education continues to rise. In some cases, these new facilities pull money directly away from other activities. That’s because they are funded wholly or in part by mandatory student fees.

Even in cases where wealthy donors foot the bill, there is a cost to the university’s broader educational mission: Money given to lavish sports facilities is money that can’t be given to scholarship funds, professorships or academic facilities.

Beyond the sheer money issue, the competition for the most lavish facilities poses another problem. It undermines the universities’ mission of providing at least a semblance of an education to their football players, the vast majority of whom will never make it to the NFL.

From a university’s point of view, building an expensive facility is an admission that its desire to win games trumps its stated goal of providing the tools football players will need once their playing days are over. Unless, of course, the players plan to make a living on the mini-golf or pro-bowling circuits.